'Like Nero,' she shrieked, 'they fiddled, now forests burn'

Labour's Mary Creagh does not make for restful company. The zen-pool atmospherics of an aromatherapy parlour are alien to her shouty style. Should you be booking a cruise for recuperation after illness brought on by stress, Miss Creagh might not be the ideal deck companion.

At the first hint of a problem she runs around shouting the parliamentary equivalent of ‘don’t panic!’ and ‘we’re all doomed!’ and ‘it’s your fault!’ Miss Creagh is Corporal Jones, Private Frazer and Captain Mainwaring rolled into one. A headache on heels.

Yesterday she tried to wobble our collies about ash dieback – a disease which threatens to do to our ash trees what Dutch beetles did to our elms 30 years ago. It’s one of those horrid scenarios most of us do our best not to contemplate. We certainly do not like to revel in the prospect of millions of lovely ash trees being killed by the chalara fraxinea fungus.

But that is not the Creagh style. She likes to summon an innocent from the ranks and shoot him, there on the parade ground, in front of the other ranks. Something must be done!

Over the weekend, the Government took moves to stop ash imports and to accelerate the destruction of suspect saplings following the arrival of ash dieback, mainly in the east of England. Until now it was found around Denmark.

A glance at even a schoolgirl atlas should make one suspect that the disease arrived here by wind. Miss Creagh, eager for a culprit, was having none of that. Not for her such a wimpish cop-out. No! Ash dieback was, she suggested in the course of a few minutes of bawling hysteria at the Commons despatch box, entirely the Coalition’s fault.

Tree-hugger: Environment Minister David Heath

‘Like Nero,’ she shrieked (imagine a sawmill blade entering pine logs), ‘ministers fiddled and now it is our forests that burn!’ Hon Members groaned, even on the Labour benches.

Why had ministers not stopped people planting ash saplings during the summer? Eh? Miss Creagh wanted to know. David Heath, Environment Minister, calmly replied that ash saplings tend not to be planted at that time of year. Ack-cher-ley.

Miss Creagh was certain that the trade unions at the Forestry Commission were being badly treated. You can normally rely on a member of Edward Miliband’s Shadow Cabinet to blame the spending reductions. Mind you, she was calling for more trees to be felled. Labour frontbencher calls for cuts!

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Outside, in rural Britain, autumn leaves helicoptered gently to the ground. Woodland vegetation gave off a rotty pong. Squirrels nibbled acorns. Nature took her gentle course, in which we are but pawns.

Inside the Commons Chamber, a furious Miss Creagh was demanding a ‘cast-iron guarantee’ from Mr Heath that no member of the public had recently imported an infected ash sapling in the boot of a motor car.

In Miss Creagh’s world, it should probably be explained, the bald noun ‘guarantee’ is not allowed to exist. It must always be a ‘cast-iron guarantee’, foundry-cast as though in the days of Brunel, so help us all.

Mr Heath told her not to be ridiculous. Of course he could not make such a guarantee. Miss Creagh threw back her head in derision, as though saying ‘ha! I thought not, tree-killer!’

This was unfair on Mr Heath, a bearded creature who may in an earlier life have been a forest-living troll. He certainly looks more of a tree-hugger than Miss Creagh, before whose advance the most sturdy oak would shrink. At one point he tried to say the words ‘pest risk analysis’ but the consonants became tangled in his facial hair.

Mr Heath was answering Miss Creagh’s Urgent Question yesterday, only because the Environment Secretary Owen Paterson was in Cannock Chase, Staffordshire, visiting woodland. Mr Heath said that the Secretary of State was ‘talking to people with the disease’.

Oh no! Don’t say human beings can get it. That will only set off more alarums from Calamity Creagh. Wicked Tories neglecting the spore!